We are a generation without farewell, says the German writer Wolfgang Borchert, summarizing the tragedy of his generation that was led into World War II without anyone saying goodbye to it. Perhaps Borchert is the voice most capable of expressing this generation, and that war that left massive material and spiritual devastation in Germany. It also left literary ruin.
Borchert left behind a collection of short stories that his fellow Nobel Prize winner for Literature, Heinrich Böll, describes as “complete masterpieces,” while Egyptian writer Ibrahim Aslan sees in his stories “a sublime expression of the ferocity of all wars without a single direct word.”
In this book, we present to the reader a selection of these stories, and what attracted us to them is the human approach to major topics, such as war and death, love and the feeling of loss, and the artistic expression of them.
The electricity was on
The book talks about Fareej Al Sharq, which is the neighborhood in which I lived during my childhood, and the people of the East and their kindness, solidarity, and cooperation.
It is a narration of the memories, adventures, and fantasies that I lived with the girls of Al Freej
The book focuses on the era of the seventies and eighties from my perspective and life in this period, and it is necessary to generalize it to everyone who lived that era.
There are funny situations, there are sad situations, and there are surprising ones.
In the introduction to his first collection of short stories, the Chinese storyteller Lu Xun says that he found himself driven to write because he felt intense loneliness. He was not able to forget, or, rather, he was not able to forget completely; So, he wrote stories about the past.
This is exactly what prompted me to write: overwhelming loneliness. I also failed to forget, so I wrote what remained in my memory about Syria before the war.
Sometimes, exiles write about nostalgia for a country they miss and wish to return to. This is not like the nostalgia of Syrians: the country has completely changed, and even disappeared. We long for a place that does not exist, except in memory. And memory, as you know, writhes, colors, and churns. I am no exception, and my memory does not claim to be completely faithful to reality, but I tried hard to write exactly what you dictated to me.
Hopes, dreams, and losses are all fading quickly, and so is the country, and what remains of it is in us: as if it were a half-smile, or a summer cloud, or a bright comet passing quickly, only to disappear completely moments later, before the eyes of curious, bored viewers, indifferent to its fate...
I committed a crime:
It is a collection of stories that talk about excerpts from situations that occurred in our reality, and each story has a different type of crime from the other.
And each story symbolizes a specific thing, or something that might cause something to break inside you?
“In this book there are six stories that are different from the others. Come and learn with me about the types of crimes in our real lives.”
From a meeting between Mihai, who is spending his honeymoon in Italy, with an old friend, the events of this novel begin. He soon finds himself leaving his wife at a train station, and begins his own journey, searching for himself and the memories of his youth. Traveling from one city to another, Mihai experiences the anxiety of his existential questions, and meets friends of that period. He learns the reason for Tamas’ suicide, and Eva’s relationship to this incident, but what does he really want from recalling stories told by time?
In this novel, which is considered one of the most prominent Hungarian novels in the modern era, which achieved great success, was translated into several languages, and was adapted for theater and cinema, the reader feels as if the author is able to penetrate his depths, and not only the depths of his characters.
